Andrew Gough's Arcadia

By Corjan de Raaf

The enigma of Rennes-le-Château is like a misty morning in that very region. It shows many great silhouettes of what appear to be beautiful things. When the smoke has lifted from the fields, few actual facts and artifacts still lie unchallenged or unsuspicious. Some artifacts, clues in fact, are less suspect than others. In this article three of those are combined into one logical puzzle. They appear to have something remarkable in common. It appears they were meant to point to the same location. Remarkable, when you realize it concerns three different artifacts, created by different men in different ages. In this article I want to take you by the hand on a journey of discovery, shedding new light on some of the best known but least understood clues in the enigma of Rennes-le-Château and their link with the ancient sacred landscape of Perillos.

I owe at least some of my ideas and insights to André Douzet and Filip Coppens of Société Perillos and the extensive research work they published through the years. Additionally, I’d like to thank my co-researchers at the Dutch Terug naar de Bron (Back to the Source) Internet Forum, that constantly challenge and correct me. Thanks also to Jean-Pierre d’Aniort for showing me an aerial photograph of Perillos over a great dinner.

The story starts with the Coumesourde stone once again. In a previous article the conclusion was that the text has a double meaning, both indicating a location and containing clues of what is hidden there. Some consider it has its origins in regional Templar history. Others are more precise and claim the stone was left by a member of the Fleury family when they had to flee from the Citoyens of the French Revolution just before the end of the 19th century.

The Dalle de Coumesourde

The stone has a clear triangular design. It might well have been meant to represent a landscape. That landscape would have had to be similarly triangular in nature (or made so by human intervention) and the distance between the three dots to connect must have been overseeable. If indeed an ancient secret was kept there, it would have been concealed without the professional GPS and survey equipment we have today. The map would only make sense to those who know how and where to use it: Solis Sacerdotibus. Only the initiates, who knew the area in which to place the map and knew how to interpret it, would be able to find what’s there. Like a Japanese book without any pictures, lying for everyone to grab on your lounge room table but that will only come to life if you can read and understand the language.

After concluding that the letters PS, that feature on many of the major artifacts in the enigma, could well stand for ‘Perillos’, it was a small step to have a closer look at that area. The attention was drawn to this remote and hostile piece of France by André Douzet, after he found two graves there with the help of a Notary’s register from the 1600’s and a plaster model, Bérenger Saunière had designed just before his death. I have no doubt that model was really ordered by Saunière. André found the location when, by chance during an attempt to copy the model, he had a look at the negative and recognized pieces of the Perillos landscape. His anchor point he claims, was the Roc Redon, a striking natural feature that has been in the area as long as people can remember and probably a lot longer. It’s an ingenious clue when you think of it. On the original Model there’s a cistern in the place that is said to link to Roc Redon. It is on the negative of the model that this cistern turns into Redon’s familiar shape. In reality the exact inverse is the case: on top of the Roc Redon there used to be an ancient cistern.

Roc Redon

Many people have searched the landscape with photos of the model, but as far as I know, no-one ever managed to find these two graves with it or make an acceptable match between the model and the landscape yet.

Roc Redon with the Vallée Oriole in the distance

When you look at Perillos from the air, a clear triangular shape is visible. The three dots that need to be connected are the huge plateau, that once housed the Château d’Opoul, (or Château de Salvaterra as it's called on early maps), the Vallée Oriole and the ruined village of Perillos. The plateau and the valley are clearly distinguishable natural features. You literally can’t look past them. The ruined village of Perillos is a man-made feature that closes that triangle perfectly. Douzet and Coppens have pointed out that in the ancient sacred landscape of Perillos, three chapels lie on an almost straight line, the left leg of the triangle. It’s the Chapel of Oriole, St. Michael’s Chapel in Perillos and Ste Barbara’s Chapel just outside the ruined village. The line runs all the way across the top of the Montaillou de Perillou, the big mountain behind Perillos that was called the Mount of Olives on early maps of the area. In earlier times, there was a Chapel in the middle of the huge plateau, so dependent on when the map was conceived, the three anchorpoints were possibly meant to be three Chapels of which on is no longer there.

Aerial photo of the Perillos area, courtesy of IGN

The three chapels and the plateau with the Château d’Opoul

Did these structures exist in earlier times? The answer is that they did and from 1754 onwards there was even a reliable map, made by the famous French cartographer Cassini. As you can see in the picture, the Dalle de Coumesourde maps well both on the 18th century map as on the modern IGN map of the area.

Dalle de Coumesourde mapped on the 18th century Cassini map of France and on a modern IGN Map

The mapping revealed a circular hill somewhere in the middle of the triangle, its spot indicated by the big cross on the Dalle de Coumesourde.

A closer look at the aerial photo showed what looked like a man-made circular feature with some buildings on it. It was already halfway the night when I discovered that the hill was actually looking back at me. There appears to be a skull-like rock on the hill. I do realize they find these on Mars all the time so I didn’t think it could be real or very significant.

The circular shaped hill with an intentional or unintentional skull shaped rock or formation

The circular shaped hill with the magnificent plateau of the Château Opoul behind it in the distance

After drawing a line-frame of the Dalle de Coumesourde I decided to draw a line through the heart, over the hill in the direction of the left leg, positioned between the Chapel of Oriole and St. Michael’s Chapel in Perillos. The intersection didn’t lie in the middle of the line and didn’t seem to indicate anything of interest.

Line frame of the Dalle de Coumesourde,
superimposed over the IGN map of the area

It was time to have a look at the second artifact, carrying the PS Praecum inscription: the stone slab that once sealed the tomb of Marie de Negri d’Ables. Abbé Antoine Bigou, who preceded Saunière by over a hundred years is considered to be the one that made this stone or at least had it commissioned. Bigou was close to the local noble family of Hautpoul-Blanchefort, allegedly the source of the secret. Although the Eglise Madeleine in Rennes-le-Château ceased to be the Hautpoul’s private chapel after the 14th century, there is little doubt that Bigou was the Hautpoul’s confident and counselor.

Marie de Negri’s husband, François d’Hautpoul-Rennes (+1753) was the last male in the main bloodline that had served to keep a great secret. The story goes that on Marie’s deathbed, Bigou was entrusted with a great secret and ordered to conceal it. Allegedly he did so on the tombstone of Marie. Perhaps he even created a mock grave for it. Before Bigou fled from the revolution in 1792, he is said to have documented parts of the secret or additional clues to the location which he hid in his church. Saunière found them there almost one hundred years later. He understood enough of the documents to go through considerable lengths to chisel away the inscriptions on Marie de Negri’s grave, unaware that they had been captured on paper by a passing study group, the Scientific Research Society of the Aude, that published its picture in 1906.

The horizontal Tombstone of Marie de Négri d’Ables

There are many remarkable features on the stone, including the use of the combined Latin and Greek alphabet and several crosses and markings. If the thought was for it to be a simple map of an area, there would have had to be directions and locations enciphered in it. The attention is drawn to the two little crosses that often represent churches on maps. The first and last letters are E and O (mega). It makes sense that in terms of direction they would mean: Est and Ouest, East and West in French.

If you place the PS on Perillos with the arrowed line on the left leg of the triangle, the line between the two crosses runs exactly from East to West and intersects exactly on the point that I found using the Dalle the Coumesourde. As to demonstrate I did the right thing, the line between the two crosses intersects that triangle (delta) on the tombstone to create an exact mirror image on what I did on the Dalle de Coumesourde. Moreover, the point X was right in the middle of the arrowed line. Two of the main artifacts in the mystery, appeared to be leading to the same point. But what the significance of that point?

The Tombstone superimposed over the IGN map and the Dalle de Coumesourde

At this stage I was reminded by someone on the forum that the circular hill with the skull-like rock could be interpreted as a Skull Place or Golgotha as it is called in the bible. He also reminded me that Golgotha is one of the places, featuring on Saunière’s Maquette. The Maquette or Model, ordered by a priest who felt the end was near and just like his predecessor in 1792, felt the urge to safeguard the secret for a few initiates.

Photo of the Maquette Saunière ordered just before his death,
as discovered by André Douzet, copyright by Société Perillos

André Douzet and Filip Coppens have made it clear that the Model, or actually its negative, cannot be mapped one-to-one on a map. They say it merely describes the landscape seen from a certain point as it lay in front of the priest when he made his notes and sketches. Although that certain point has been revealed to be the Roc Redon, no-one has so far managed to place the model in the landscape, causing much suspicion among researchers as to the authenticity and relevance of the Model. If you take the new found Golgotha as an anchor point and use the general direction of Roc Redon as a second anchor point there is a possible mapping that more or less matches the underlying landscape. Even better: it matched the Dalle de Coumesourde and Marie’s Tombstone and brought meaning to point X.

The negative of the model superimposed over the Perillos Triangle

All three artifacts superimposed over the Perillos Triangle

Detail of the intersections

Where these three maps all designed to lead to the same point? At the very least, there’s a whole lot of coincidence going on. What the model added was a name to point X: Tombeau du Christ or Tomb of Christ. Does that mean the actual Tomb of Christ or is it just another breadcrumb on the trail that leads to the secret?

To be continued...

Corjan de Raaf

www.rlcresearch.com
www.rennessence.com
www.terugnaardebron.com